Fulbright had supported the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August 1964

Fulbright had supported the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August 1964,ugg bailey button triplet 1873 boots, giving President Johnson the authority to respond to apparent attacks on American vessels there, but by the summer of 1966, he had decided our policy in Vietnam was misguided, doomed to fail, and part of a larger pattern of errors that, if not changed,replica montblanc pens, would bring disastrous consequences for America and the world. In 1966, he published his views on Vietnam and his general critique of American foreign policy in his most famous book, The Arrogance of Power. A few months after I joined the committee staff, he autographed a copy for me.
Fulbrights essential argument was that great nations get into trouble and can go into long-term decline when they are arrogant in the use of their power, trying to do things they shouldnt do in places they shouldnt be. He was suspicious of any foreign policy rooted in missionary zeal, which he felt would cause us to drift into commitments which though generous and benevolent in content, are so far reaching as to exceed even Americas great capacities. He also thought that when we brought our power to bear in the service of an abstract concept, like anti-communism, without understanding local history,fake montblanc pens, culture, and politics, we could do more harm than good. Thats what happened with our unilateral intervention in the Dominican Republics civil war in 1965, where, out of fear that leftist President Juan Bosch would install a Cuban-style Communist government, the United States supported those who had been allied with General Rafael Trujillos repressive, reactionary, often murderous thirty-year military dictatorship,fake uggs for sale, which ended with Trujillos assassination in 1961.
Fulbright thought we were making the same mistake in Vietnam, on a much larger scale. The Johnson administration and its allies saw the Vietcong as instruments of Chinese expansionism in Southeast Asia, which had to be stopped before all the Asian dominoes fell to communism. That led the United States to support the anti-Communist, but hardly democratic, South Vietnamese government. As South Vietnam proved unable to defeat the Vietcong alone, our support was expanded to include military advisors, and finally to a massive military presence to defend what Fulbright saw as a weak, dictatorial government which does not command the loyalty of the South Vietnamese people. Fulbright thought Ho Chi Minh, who had been an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt for his opposition to colonialism, was primarily interested in making Vietnam independent of all foreign powers. He believed that Ho, far from being a Chinese puppet, shared the historic Vietnamese antipathy for, and suspicion of, its larger neighbor to the north. Therefore, he did not believe we had a national interest sufficient to justify the giving and taking of so many lives. Still, he did not favor unilateral withdrawal. Instead, he supported an attempt to neutralize Southeast Asia, with American withdrawal conditioned on agreement by all parties to self-determination for South Vietnam and a referendum on reunification with North Vietnam. Unfortunately, by 1968, when peace talks opened in Paris, such a rational resolution was no longer possible.